Study says: Nation’s urban areas seeing faster walking—less talking. But why?
Downtown San Jose foot traffic levels remain encouraging post-Covid, but Bloomberg wonders (via recent research) if there’s something else to consider re: doom loops. Namely, that our high-speed, digital-obsessed culture is eroding those everyday opportunities to linger and chat with strangers—as theorized in a new study (analyzing cities’ ped traffic speed/casual conversations) from Nat Bureau of Econ Research.
Are city streets places for pedestrians to hang out, or are they routes to be traversed as quickly as possible?
Americans are increasingly treating them as the latter rather than the former.
That is the striking implication of a recent interdisciplinary study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Applying modern artificial intelligence techniques to old video footage, the researchers compared pedestrian activity in 1980 and 2010 across prominent locations in Boston, New York City and Philadelphia. Their unsettling conclusion: American ambulators walked faster and schmoozed less than they used to. They seemed to be having fewer of the informal encounters that undergird civil society and strengthen urban economies.
The study was conducted by a team of eight researchers with diverse backgrounds, including Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, Michigan State communications professor Keith Hampton, and MIT urban technologist Carlo Ratti. Its lead author, Yale School of the Environment professor Arianna Salazar-Miranda, told me she was inspired by the work of William H. Whyte, a journalist and urban observer who examined how people in cities used slivers of public space. Whyte turned his insights into a film as well as a 1980 book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which has become a classic of urban planning. Among his other influences, you can credit (or blame) Whyte for the widespread public space deployment of moveable metal chairs, which he often praised for their malleable utility.
“What is personally appealing about his approach is the idea of a visual tradition to studying urban spaces,” Salazar-Miranda said. “In Whyte’s case, he used a camera and manual diagrams to tease out simple but generalizable behaviors. I think new tools and data science methods can help us do those things more systematically.”
For their study, Salazar-Miranda and her colleagues reviewed the original footage that Whyte’s team took in 1980 of pedestrian areas along Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street, Boston’s Downtown Crossing, and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bryant Park. Using computer vision and AI, they assembled data that captured how people were moving on film. They then repeated the process with footage from the same locations taken between 2008 and 2010. (Salazar-Miranda had hoped to collect newer video, she said, but doing so raised thorny privacy concerns.) Findings from 1980 videos were then compared with those collected 30 years later.
The researchers found a consistent evolution across all four locations. At each site, pedestrians walked faster in 2010 than they had in 1980, by an average of 15%. Time spent lingering in public spaces declined by roughly half, and fewer people were forming groups. In general, walkers appeared more atomized and rushed in 2010 than they had a generation before.
Salazar-Miranda said that video analysis alone cannot explain why pedestrian behavior changed, but she sees several possible factors. Since average incomes rose among those who lived and worked near all four locations, individuals’ higher value of time could deter them from engaging in leisure activities like casual conversation or strolls that now carry a higher opportunity cost. City dwellers might be having fewer social interactions of all kinds, a phenomenon that has been linked to rising rates of loneliness. And some of the pedestrians observed in 2010 could have been socializing remotely: By then, 80% of US adults had cellphones. Mobile devices may be inducing people to hang out online instead of in person. Salazar-Miranda suggested those who do get together might opt for climate-controlled, pay-to-enter “third spaces” like coffeeshops that she said have become more widely available.
“We cannot know for sure,” Salazar-Miranda said of her findings’ causes. “But it’s an indicator that the nature of public spaces may be changing.” …
“The work of Ed Glaeser, and if you go back in time, Jane Jacobs, are pointing to cities’ special ability to bring people together. That is at the core of city-making, of what it means to be urban,” Salazar-Miranda said. “This process requires random encounters, with people talking to each other and mingling and bumping into each other.” …
Salazar-Miranda said she worries her findings imply “a shift from public spaces seen as a place of random encounters and more as thoroughfares.” Those rushing from point A to point B will probably have fewer interactions with others in the public realm.
Read the whole thing here.
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